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Earlier this month, Google added a "Creative Commons Attribution" licensing option (CC-BY). This option can be selected as an alternative to the standard YouTube license when one uploads a video.

There doesn't seem to be a way to restrict a regular YouTube search so that it returns only CC-BY videos. However, there is a "CC" button in the YouTube editor that lets you search for CC-BY videos to use in mashups that you create with that tool.

It's quite a nice implementation, in that if you use someone else's CC-BY video, the required attribution gets automatically added to the YouTube page of the mashup.

On the downside, YouTube seems to have tried pretty hard to make this a walled garden. If you preview a CC-BY video in the editor, its URL is not exposed, so you can't easily go to the regular YouTube page for that video.

At the beginning of 2007, Philipp wrote a piece "Google and Creative Commons" where he identified a number of places where Google could embrace Creative Commons licensing:blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-0 ...

These things take time, but at least Google seems to be moving in the right direction. This will make it much easier for people to create video mashups that Google can host without problems.